


War isn't Pretty

by JUBE514



Series: Time Travel'n Palidin's [1]
Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Everyone Has Issues, Gen, How Do I Tag, Hurt, Hurt Hunk (Voltron), Hurt Keith (Voltron), Hurt Lance (Voltron), Hurt Pidge (Voltron), Hurt Shiro (Voltron), Hurt/Comfort, Lance (Voltron) Angst, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Some comfort, They Deal With It, This is a prequel?, War, listen its a war, some better than others, they get hurt, they're gonna get injured
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-10-19
Updated: 2017-10-19
Packaged: 2019-01-19 11:40:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,340
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12409635
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JUBE514/pseuds/JUBE514
Summary: A lot of injuries happened in space, most of them small little nicks and bumps. Little easy things to cover up and kiss better, the simple wear and tear of life around them and something that everyone on board was used to. A stubbed toe here, a jammed finger there. A paper cut, a scab, a scratch, a bruise, bumps, lumps, and scrapes.Lance hits his forearm on a hot metal pipe when fixing the castle with Coran, Shiro accidentally closes the oven door on his hand, Keith cuts himself when handling his own sword, Pidge trips down the stairs, Hunk catches his finger in a science experiment.The ship goes on. The humans on it learning that Alteans couldn’t get paper cuts, and had no funny bone in their elbows, couldn’t get brain-freezes, but one solid hit to a point on their hip and both legs would collapse underneath them, if you tugged on their ears it was extremely ticklish, their fingers could not jam they’d just break.Injuries in a war were much more severe, a lot more damaging.





	War isn't Pretty

A lot of injuries happened in space, most of them small little nicks and bumps. Little easy things to cover up and kiss better, the simple wear and tear of life around them and something that everyone onboard was used to. A stubbed toe here, a jammed finger there. A paper cut, a scab, a scratch, a bruise, bumps, lumps, and scrapes. 

Lance hits his forearm on a hot metal pipe when fixing the castle with Coran, Shiro accidentally closes the oven door on his hand, Keith cuts himself when handling his own sword, Pidge trips down the stairs, Hunk catches his finger in a science experiment. 

The ship goes on. The humans on it learning that Alteans couldn’t get paper cuts, and had no funny bone in their elbows, couldn’t get brain-freezes, but one solid hit to a point on their hip and both legs would collapse underneath them, if you tugged on their ears it was extremely ticklish, their fingers could not jam they’d just break. 

Injuries in a war were much more severe, a lot more damaging. 

Hunk’s shoulders peppered with potholes from protecting Pidge when she was downed on a planet surface side. Keith being shoved down a ravine and busting his lip so badly that it scarred to forever show his incisor. Lance having twisting burns across his back from saving Coran. Pidge’s tiny little holes decorating her legs from an alien bioweapon that produced a virus. 

Shiro didn’t have an entire limb. 

And that’s his worse one, the thick keloids that tended to form on his skin surrounding what was left of his shoulder, some red and healing while others a blistering purple that bled into softer skin. A heated kind of angry scar, the kind that never healed right and bubbled up angrily because of it. A thick ugly mess that was visibly rough, felt like asphalt under Shiro’a real fingers and collected water that had to be specifically dried when taking easy things like showers. This scar across the top of smooth metal was the very embodiment of what the Galra were to the galaxy, a festering mess that tried to cover themselves up with shining metal but when revealed their true colors only a mangled mess came out. Shiro hates to look at the thing, hates to watch it try and heal only to get another cyst underneath the surface and pop and ooze. Hates the way he can’t figure out how to take off his metal arm until a full year aboard the ship. 

Hates the way he cried at the feeling of freedom being taken away within moments of taking the arm off, because Shiro looks at the mirror and sees the glinting broken deformed humerus that angry red skin only barely stretched over. Shiro sees the wires and artificial nerves that still connected the damn arm to his actual shoulder and he looses it, right there in his room.

But Shiro continues on anyway, because that’s what he’s always done and that’s what he’s meant to do. Keeps the arm covered by sleeves and away from his line of sight, rests the awkward weight on tables and chairs and supports it with his other hand. 

Keith gets badly injured on the team first, on one of his Blade of Mamora missions that he still doesn’t like to talk about to this day. Is fighting a commander with a fondness for sharpened gauntlets when the injury happens, a quick swipe forward as Keith plunges his blade into the commander’s lungs, feeling the soft decompress of air watching as a single drop slides down. 

The commander, knowing the outcome, curses so badly that Coran didn’t include the words in the portable translators and takes a dying strike at Keith, who’s already getting ready to pull his blade out. 

The gauntlet only gets one claw into Keith’s soft side, at the top of Keith’s left hipbone, but the commander dies and the heavy metal drags from one hip through Keith’s lower gut and gets snagged on the right pelvic bone. 

The scar is a long trailing one, looking like a pink river drawn across Keith’s stomach and cutting through the hair leading from his navel downwards. It’s only visible during lazy days where sweatpants aren’t tied tight, sagging low in the kitchen as Keith eats his weight in what tastes like pepperoni but looks like peppermint. 

Keith deals with it by gripping his gut when the panic hits, holding in the soft warm intestines that fell like wet paper bags when the gash originally left him bleeding out on the floor of a doomed Galra cruiser. Deals with the fright when an enemy gets too close by learning to fold his torso over it, creating a soft space where he feels safe and warm and isolated. 

But not everyone deals with their injuries alone. 

Hunk tends to find comfort in others, settling down like a solid oak and going boneless against a teammate. Shiro never even flinches, taking Hunk’s weight like he doesn’t even realize. Keith snuggles back, aching for touch after his years of being starved of it. Lance likes to put himself on top of Hunks lap, wiggling until he’s perfectly placed in between Hunk’s legs and allows Hunk to lean into his back. Pidge just accepts that she’ll be squashed into oblivion, lays down and gives Hunk the time he needs, or until she can’t breathe anymore. 

Hunk never can stand through his ache, a deep bone weary twinge that makes him sit down and rub the long scar that sits right at the middle of his inner thigh. 

It was a lucky shot from a Galra soldier, a heated laser blast snaking it’s way through their shields and striking Hunk right where his armor stopped. 

The only reason that shot didn’t kill Hunk was the fact that the laser was so hot that it cauterized as it tore through the thick material of the black flexible armor, through Hunk’s soft tan skin and into his femoral artery. 

The whole team rushed Hunk to the healing pods, got out of the outpost and back to the ship and wormholed across the universe in only two minutes. 

A record at the time. 

Hunk spent two weeks in the pod, the healing nanotechnology trying desperately to repair and replace. 

Another record. 

Hunk got out of that pod with a large replacement metal vein that aches in the cold and burns in the heat. Jarring when showering and he presses against the scar just a little too hard and the metal tube presses back. His muscle in the area now a shiny translucent replacement, the scar stitched with wire that left small surgical holes across either side. The cut goes as long as Hunk’s hand, from the tip of his middle finger to his wrist, and Hunk feels worse about the fact that this is his worst scar when other people around him carry their own with a shocking visibility. 

But where Hunk’s injury was quick to be treated Pidge’s worst wound took an entire month festering with her running and rotting in a Galra prison camp. 

She had been captured, easily out matched in strength and just plucked from the front lines by an escaping general trying to save his own skin. A panic pistol whip too the back of Pidge’s head took her out for the count, and she didn’t realize that at the time the delicate skin at the base of her skull cracked. She woke up and a prisoner with striped zebra skin was gently trying to stem the bleeding with the dirty water around them. 

Pidge found out about halfway through her capture that the “water” wasn’t even full water, it was a dirty mixture that wasn’t helping her fever, the thick green pus that leaked from the small gash every night, the slow smell starting to waft from the three inch long tear right at the base of her skull. 

She continues to thank Bear Grylls, that beautiful survivalist of a man, for keeping her entertained enough to listen to his survival tips. She has a very shitty drawing taped to her bathroom mirror, memories of watching Bear Grylls with Matt and going camping with the family and boiling water to clean it, administering first aid to scrapes and cuts when she and Matt fell down on the trails. 

Pidge is an ingenious innovator, she boiled the shitty swamp water in her chest plate that she’d hammered out to a bowl. Boiled the fucking water over a fire that she hid from the guards with thick tree roots and large fonds. The swamp she had been banished too didn’t know she was a paladin, didn’t know what they had in a skinny human that had been accepted into the system under the wrong name.

She survived in the humid hot place by gritting her teeth and ignoring the throbbing headaches, the blurry vision, the slowly worsening infection. She answered to her brothers name, Matt, rattled off his ID number as easily as breathing, pushed down her gender again and felt the bile rise in her throat every time a Galra soldier referred to her has a “him”. 

Her teammates found her, hugged her tight and Shiro was crying real tears as he holds her head carefully against his chest, his hand brushing against the infection and Pidge simply blacking put into blissful blankness. 

It took a week for the infection to clear out of her system, a week of in and out of the healing pod’s with Coran carefully cleaning out the little cut each time. 

Pidge is accepted back easily into her team, adjusts to the environment of safety and cleanliness and home. She sometimes will wake up and night screaming, if dirt gets into her sheets and she feels it on her back. She’ll panic when wading through mud and muck, sharply inhale when her workstation becomes muddled. A ping goes through her if the container isn’t clear and she can’t see the liquid inside. 

The others adjust quickly, because they have too, but Lance after his worst injury takes his adjustment slow, tentative, with setback after setback and a lack of depth and perceptive. 

Lance was sniping in a nest on a stakeout, playing a long game of quiet, listen, watch, repeat. Lance is in that nest for two days as Keith and Hunk smile their way into this planets royalty. Lance watches for the flash of white that tells him the king -who is a Galra sympathizer and is systematically selling his people to the slave system- is vulnerable to a single shot to take him out. 

As soon as Lance takes the shot he turns to run from his nest, weapon dissolving after having to be kept out for days on end, and Lance turns right into a Galra guard. The guard and Lance wrestle, fighting like animals against each other desperate for survival. 

The Galra lands a good hit to Lance, smacks him across the head good, but Lance manages to shoot the Galra between the eyes, breathing hard as the form under him goes limp. 

It doesn’t even take a second before Lance is screaming, holding his eye and crying and then screaming because the tears are painful. 

The Galra took his eye, his right eye, and the white scar stands stark against his tanned skin. 

A trail of claw marks, breaking through Lance’s eyebrow and cutting down through his cheek and across his jaw, bleeding heavily from a nick or two in his neck right at his pulse point. Three distinct lines trail in a straight thin path across the entire side, the middle one being the largest and the two on either side almost thin enough that Lance can sometimes convince himself they’ve disappeared. 

Coran and Allura gave him a false teleduv (because glass apparently is a hot commodity) eye to hold the socket, one that sparkled the colors of an Altean eye and had to be shaped slightly to fit in his skull. The false eye doesn’t move with him, a stationary point as Lance rolls his remaining eye or cuts his gaze to the floor. 

It takes months to acclimate to it. 

Lance relearns how to shoot, how to move, how to judge distances, how to grab, how to live while his body still adjusts to the singular image it’s now receiving. 

His shots were shaky at first, all over the place. A lot of feeble attempts at training with the others, trying to dodge kicks that were too close and attempting to hit when his teammates were too far away. 

Lance has moments of frustration, nights were he just screamed at the top of his lungs in the pool trying to muffle the sound. He tried to wear an eyepatch but hates the attention it brings to the already stark scarring. Hates the fact nobody meets his gaze anymore, just stares at the scar and smiles sadly at him. The girls coo at it, bashing their lashes at the war hero, the boys compliment him on it, because is a cool manly scar. 

But Lance hates it because it’s just his scar that’s garnering the attention, and nothing about his own self. 

Hates it because it takes him a long time to control the fake eye. Hates it because he wakes up in the dark and panics because he thinks he can’t use his other eye. Full blindness. He hates the fact that when he’s tired he can’t judge distances worth shit and can’t aim. 

Hates it because his Mama always said she loved his blue eyes, her little ocean boy, and he’s damaged them. 

The war is hard on them all. Takes it out of their minds and bodies. Creates a strung out body that’s barely living in between fights. Creates a nervous kind of energy when the fighting ceases. 

Scrapes and bruises are common, but war is hell on them anyway.

**Author's Note:**

> fick me this was meant to be a oneshot


End file.
